The East–West Schism splits Latin and Greek Christianity
- Date
- 16 July 1054
- Category
- Religion & ideology
- Region
- Mediterranean (Rome & Constantinople)
- Era
- Post-Classical / Medieval
- Significance
In 1054 the long-building rift between the Latin (Roman) and Greek (Byzantine) churches hardened into formal schism.
On 16 July, legates of Pope Leo IX, led by Cardinal Humbert, laid a bull of excommunication on the altar of Hagia Sophia against Patriarch Michael I Cerularius of Constantinople, who days later condemned the legates in turn. Beneath the immediate quarrel over the leavened versus unleavened bread of the Eucharist and the disputed 'filioque' clause of the creed lay the deeper question of papal primacy: whether the bishop of Rome held supreme authority over the whole Church, or was merely 'first among equals' alongside the Eastern patriarchs. Though contemporaries did not see 1054 as a permanent breach, the mutual excommunications were never effectively reversed and the two communions drifted apart. The division between Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy proved enduring, shaping the religious geography of Europe and the Near East for the next thousand years; the excommunications were only lifted symbolically by Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras I in 1965.
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Empires active in 16 July 1054
- Abbasid Caliphate750 CE – 1258 CE
- Song Dynasty960 CE – 1279 CE
- Byzantine Empire330 CE – 1453 CE
- Kanem-Bornu Empire700 CE – 1900 CE
- Toltec State (Tula)950 CE – 1168 CE
- Kievan Rus'882 CE – 1240 CE
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Further reading
The wider story
A Little History of Religion
Accessible sweep of humanity's faiths and belief systems from prehistory to the present.
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